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Principles for Better Self- and Co-Regulation and Establishment of a Community of Practice

Published by Newsroom Editor on 11/02/2013

Today we publish the results of Action 5 of the Commission's CSR strategy for 2011-2014 with a twofold initiative: setting out best practice Principles for Better Self- and Co-regulation and establishing a Community of Practice gathering stakeholders interested in Self- and Co-Regulation.

Today we publish here the first results of the European Commission's Communication A renewed EU strategy 2011-14 for Corporate Social Responsibility (COM (2011) 681 final[1]) of October 2011. DG CONNECT took the lead for Action 5, which reads as follows:

"Launch a process in 2012 with enterprises and other stakeholders to develop a code of good practice for self- and co-regulation exercises, which should improve the effectiveness of the CSR process".

Outcome

Set-out best practice Principles for Better Self- and Co-regulation[7]. This should help actors involved in self- and co-regulation to do better and get better recognition, respect, and credibility for their efforts. It should help to ensure that self- and co-regulation exercises achieve their intended societal, environmental and governance goals more effectively and more efficiently. All stakeholders are invited to consider these Principles as benchmark for self- and co-regulation and to promote their use.

Establish a Community of Practice[8] that will gather all stakeholders interested in promoting, experiencing and improving the Principles for Better Self- and Co-regulation, whether EU-based or not, as well as experts interested in supporting the vision and bringing a contribution to this endeavour. The Community of Practice will work through an on-line platform, which would initiate a collection of best practice literature and case studies and support capacity-building in the use of the guidelines for self- and co-regulation. We aim to call the first meeting of this Community of Practice in the second half of 2013.

Next steps

The Commission services will use these best practice Principles as one building block in the review of the Impact Assessment Guidelines that has been announced in the context of the Communication on EU Regulatory Fitness[9].

As to the Community of Practice ("CoP"), the Commission intends to embed the work of the CoP in broader CSR conversations concerning various sectors. In respect of the ICT sector, please have a look at the ICT4Society[10] multi-stakeholder platform. We intend to make a call for tender to create support for the CoP, as only as it emerges in the ICT field, but also in other sectors where self- and co-regulation may continue to be developed.